Tuesday, 9 April 2013

Post-Traditional Buddhism: the quiet revolution? Part. 1

Intro
to the act

Imagine
a giant golden Buddha statue sat in front of you right now. The Buddha’s golden
gaze stares out onto an invisible horizon, expressing an out of reach wisdom
and supreme intellect. His hands are clasped in unifying grace and his legs are
perfectly placed in a lotus posture. The statue gives off an aura of graceful
bliss, of wisdom, compassion and perfect meditational equipoise. Surely this
image represents the quintessence of Buddhist iconography, its most
transcendent and instantly recognisable form.

Golden
statues are accompanied by exotic robes in most traditional gathering places
for Buddhists. Incense is lit and golden bowls may hold offerings for imagined beings.
Other more mundane objects such as zafus still draw heavily on Eastern forms,
colours and shapes and each adds to that ‘je ne sais quoi’ that inspires warm
feelings in the bellies of curious seekers, and quite possibly a smidgen of
confusion. Seekers of one kind or another are still attracted by the exotic, by
other, by the symbolic matrices that accompany religion, and most likely always
will be as we are visual, feeling creatures.

Although
not up to Hinduism’s standards, Buddhism has its fair share of rich visual
display that acts to seduce the observer. Why is it that we are so drawn to symbols?
Why is it that so many are drawn to religion, in this case by Buddhism, through
rich symbology and unarticulated appearance? Perhaps in part, such exotic
symbolism provides us with an alternative experiential environment, within which,
we can explore different meaning-making systems, and feel free, to some degree,
to shed the binds that adhere us to pre-existing, culturally normalised realms
of being. The exotic provides us with a back door exit from our mundane
existence, and further, from the pain and suffocation of modernity. The problem
is that such an exit can lead us not to freedom, but to escapism and the
adoption of a new identity, a newly fabricated self that reflects its new
environment, both ideologically and behaviourally. We become new all right. Though
we emerge as a false image of a distorted self that is framed in new jargon,
hidden and stifled beneath the surface in a prism that distorts our own voice,
our own knowing, and lack of knowing, through the lens of a Buddhist persona.

Part
1. Getting started, or, how did I end up here?

I
feel like we are in a trap as Buddhists. Too many of us have failed to realise
that the grand Buddhist experiment is not revealed through adopting alien forms
and practice, but by invoking the Buddha’s example to go all the way to the end
of the path and to find that way through our own lived experience. We have
taken the outer forms of Buddhism to be the real thing, when they are not. We
have confused mortal men with saints and super-beings and invested our hopes in
reassurances from those who we don’t know intimately. We have failed to grasp
the weight of the task and the need to take full responsibility for our path.

I
am pushing heavily against traditional Buddhism, in part as a reaction against
my own past participation in traditional Tibetan Buddhism and for the delusion,
disappointment and immense dissatisfaction that came about as a result. I feel
like I have spent the last 10 years slowly escaping from the pitfalls and traps
of traditional Buddhism and have myself emerged into a much more rational and
all too human landscape which is much less artificial. In the first few years
of my heavy involvement in Tibetan Buddhism, I managed to convince myself that it was the answer to my confusion, the
way to freedom, and the response to my need to belong to something meaningful.
I soaked up Buddhist beliefs, Buddhist perspectives, Buddhist ideals, Buddhist
language and Buddhist modes of interpreting my place in the world and the events
that took place in it.

I
immersed myself in a new jargon, a new look, a new lifestyle and shifted my
priorities towards the club of dharma. The immersion deepened and the world
became filtered through a lens of Buddhist stardust: Karma, Dhukka, Dharma. Karma, Dhukka, Dharma. Karma, Dhukka, Dharma
went the Buddha train onto which I had set forth to mysterious new experiential
lands of feelings and thoughts that were exciting and symbolically rich.

With
time I came to see that I was closed inside an ideological cabin on this train.
The outer world became a blur and my internal experience was governed and
dictated to me by the train’s internal upholstery of Buddhist symbols, Tibetan colours
and dharma advertising and the voices and sounds that emerged through the loud tannoy
overhead were in Tibetan and Buddha-speak. All my fellow passengers were riding
on the same ticket, so when I felt the distorting nature of all this new
imagery and sound, none of them could help me to see where the cause of this
distortion lay. When I wanted to look out of the window, their voices provided
little help and simply insisted I focus more on the furniture and concentrate more
on the voices filling the space. It didn’t take long for me to realise that I
had to get off the train and see where it was going from the outside, in order
to gain perspective and separate from the soporific effect of that closed and
self-referential space.

I
left the train and experimented with a wide variety of platforms, using each to
provide perspective on the all absorbing journey I had taken. So seductive was
it that not only had I identified with it,
I had become it. Shifting perspective
from inner to outer brought me to a slow recognition that I was not gaining any
particular freedom through all of the Buddhist behaviour I had adopted. I was
simply exchanging one internal structure that surrounded my core with another.
Sure, I seemed to suffer less, but perhaps it was simply the case that the way
I suffered was different - less obvious, more subtle. In order to rid myself of
this false internal fabric, I began experimenting with other paths, primarily
in the world of shamanism. Shamanism provided a dramatic return to the body, to
direct, primal experience. It violently disrupted the Buddhist aesthetic and
spun my perceptual frames upside down. It took a while, but the extremely
important recognition that the path is met through the body and acted out in
the physical spaces that we occupy emerged unmediated. I came to realise that our
direct experience in the physical ‘life-world’, to quote the German father of
phenomenology Edmund Husserl,
is where we meet the possibilities and limits of this precious human existence
and our deeply personal, lived path unfolds.

After
returning to the flesh and the simplicity and immediacy of the body I began to
seek mental purification from Buddhism’s ideological opium. The seductive
nature of belief, truth and certainty manifested in the speech of gurus, revered
texts and quotes from Buddhist friends had left me impoverished intellectually
and I had to peel away not only the bullshit, but the layers of precocious
Buddhist outlook. Receiving too much inherited wisdom is harmful. You see, it
is not only insufficient simply to read about advanced stages of meditation
practice and realisation, it is damaging to our delicate and unfolding
awareness and curiosity for the immediate. Simply stated, I needed to rid
myself of the curse of too much artificial knowledge in order to find the
limits and edges of what I, as an individual, actually knew through my own
direct and lived experience. I needed to reacquaint myself with my own
intellectual landscape, in part shared amongst fellow westerners, built on
years and years of hard earned collective mental graft. I decided to engage
with Buddhism again as an outsider and leave behind all books, texts and
teachings given by non-western Buddhists and those enamoured by Asian Buddhist
forms.

I
read books by academics of Buddhist studies who pointed out the fallacies of
hagiographic interpretations of Buddhism's rich history. I read of how the
romanticised, peace loving Tibetans were actually a fierce and warring people,
some of whom had murdered and suppressed others to assert the supremacy of
their particular religious tradition. I learnt of how Japanese Zen monks
supported war crimes and acts of aggression and jingoistic nationalism in the Second
World War. I listened to John
Peacock and Rita
Gross dissect poor translations of key Buddhist terminology and concepts - revealing
how the exotic had infiltrated intended meaning along with overtly Christian
world views. I read up on the sexual abuse enacted by famous Tibetans and
westerners following too closely in their footsteps. I read criticism after
criticism of Buddhism by dead and living western philosophers. My god it was
satisfying. Not because I wanted to bring Buddhism down and destroy it. I
gained no joy in trashing Buddhism. No, the pleasure emerged from ruthlessly
pulling apart, ripping apart the walls of inauthenticity, of false comfort and
self-delusion that I had constructed to keep the world at bay and that were
sustained by Buddhism and the false symbols that surround it.

Later
I came to discover new voices of my own generation. I followed all of the podcasts
so generously made available by the Buddhist Geeks and
even dabbled in the Dharma
Overground, where enlightenment has lost its exclusivity. I explored in
depth the work of a new generation of provocateurs including Ken McLeod, Kenneth Folk and Stephen Batchelor, to
name just a few. I participated actively online in Buddhist forums and blogs by
Dave Chapman, the Non-Speculative Buddhism chaps, Brad
Warner and many others expressing my own emerging opinions, and criticising
those I considered to be trapped in romantic and idealised interpretations of
the path. Finally, I found a truly contemporary western Buddhist teacher deeply
rooted in the West with whom to work in a more balanced manner, which has
upgraded my practice in deep and important ways and where my own voice is heard
and responded to. I came full circle and re-engaged with Buddhism on new terms.

In
spite of all this, I recognise how my own identification with this new process
of shifting towards a dynamic re-interpretation and re-utilisation of Buddhism
twisted my own perception of the relevance of Buddhism as a whole. In
reflecting on this piece, I came to realise how ridiculous my own rational
notions of transparency and openness could be. I may like to strip bare
Buddhism and rummage through its innards, but why should I assume this to be
the necessary goal for all Buddhists. I see how, in dissecting Buddhism like a
butcher, ruthlessly, I had attempted to push its corpse downstream and off a
waterfall of no return. I kind of fell into the trap of believing that my new
view of Buddhism (a new idealism) was superior, or different somehow from my
old idealism, and yet I found myself making the same weak arguments that I had
made when my enthusiasm first peaked over traditional Buddhism years back - that
what I believe is best, must be best for you too. So, let me openly lay down
the remaining traces of arrogance and be care-full in saying that I honour the
Buddhist path for making this life that I live possible. I honour the wealth of
tradition and its continued relevance in the West for many folks. I honour the
traditions that were brought to the West for providing such a rich and
immensely beautiful and honourable mixture of multiple faces and interpretations
of dharmic possibility. I am grateful to Buddhism for its successes and
failings. Now I can move on.

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About Me

I'm a Life Coach, Core Shamanic Counsellor and meditation teacher to boot. I also teach English in Trieste, Italy. I follow a non-traditional expression of Buddhism and also run occasional events over the border from Trieste in Slovenia on Shamanism. Email me if you're curious about any of these activities.

Benvenuti (welcome)

This blog started out as an experiment. It continues to be such to this day. The opinions you will find in these pages are my own, and like all material on this Earth, are subject to change due to that hidden factor of impermanence.

This blog started out as an experiment. Writing is an art and one which I am only now starting to develop any capacity in. All of my writing constitutes a learning process in the presentation of ideas, opinions and experience. I am no expert, but I am doing my best to develop and learn from each piece I publish.

This blog started out as an experiment. I've no idea where it will end up. I explore Buddhist and Shamanic themes in this blog. Both areas which interest a fairly small percentage of Western society. Therefore this blog is quite specialist. It goes one step further by not representing any particular tradition in either of these spiritual arenas, although I have grounding in two shamanic worlds; one a path, the other an approach to counselling. My experience of Buddhism is primarily within the Tibetan and Theravada traditions.